Why You Want Vitamin D3
(or Sunshine) Hint: No Colds, No Flu

Summary
In sufficient quantity, Vitamin D3 and/or
sunshine means no colds, no flu, and no sickness--and for good reason.

Eric Armstrong
TreeLight.com/Health

My friend Vicki
Adair was a big fan of Dr.
Mercola--an
MD who specializes in nutritional remedies. She didn't find him in time to
save herself from the medical industry, but she led me to a terrific
source of nutritional information. I think of her every time I visit that
site. This time, the subject was Vitamin D and flu shots. This article summarizes
what you need to know about both of them.

Vitamin D

I've long been a fan of Vitamin C, ever since reading Linus
Pauling's book, How
to Live Longer and Feel Better, but I have to confess
that while Vitamin C has helped to keep me strong and fit, it hasn't managed
to keep from getting colds and the flu. Of course, it turns out that gluten
reactions were masquerading as flu symptoms more often than I realized.
But after being gluten-free for a year, I still caught at least
one serious bug last winter.

Today I find out how to keep such illnesses from ever happening again.
In the words of Dr. Cannel:

"If you ask anybody who takes 5,000 units of Vitamin D a day, they'll
tell you they just don't get sick anymore. The colds and flu--they just don't
happen."

Of course, much of the Vitamin D you need comes from sunshine--when it's sunny
and it's warm enough to have skin exposed. In fact, that's the best possible
source for Vitamin D, because it lowers cholesterol, as well. (It
is the cholesterol your body manufactures that gets converted to Vitamin D
in the skin, when exposed to sunlight.)

People
tend to have 1/3 as much Vitamin D in the winter, which pretty much explains
why you get sick more often in the winter.

Of all possible explanations
for why you get sick more often in the winter, Vitamin D is the best. You don't
get sick because the air is colder, because you're in more crowded surroundings,
or because you don't exercise as much. All of those might be fairly plausbile
valid conjectures--except for the fact the Vitamin D hypothesis is accompanied
by a solid mechanism
of action:

Note:
Understanding
the mechanism of action is important. Until we know how X
acts as a remedy for Y, any recommendation for X is just a matter of conjecture--and
that's as true for pill-pushing doctors as it is for "aternative
health" practitioners and snake oil salesmen.

It turns out that Vitamin D is the precursor to antimicrobial
peptides that
stop bacteria and viruses dead in their tracks. It also turns out that it provides
the most efficient access to the body's DNA library--the library that
tells a cell how to manufacture an antibody for the tuberculosis bug, for
example. (100 years ago, the AMA published studies showing that sunlight
helped to combat tuberculosis. That sort of thing stopped when they were
overrun by the drug companies. After all, there's no profit in sunlight.)

Note:
Dr. Mercola also reports that drug companies are working to combat (profitable)
analogs of Vitamin D, because of its reported benefit in reversing cancer.
(It is apparently to much to ask for them to do the public a service.)

Beyond its disease fighting effects, it
turns out that Vitamin D mediates
inflammation. That's pretty big for me and anyone else who has a gluten
intolerance, because inflammation is the mechanism that produces many of
gluten's ill effects. It's also important for anyone who exercises, since
inflammation is one of the side effects.

Ever notice how people are more likely to get
sick after strenuous exercise. Now we know why:

So it turns out that, all in all, Vitamin D is a lot more important than I
had been giving it credit for.

How Much You Need for Prevention

When you take the vitamin as a supplement, you want Vitamin
D3--the bioavailable
form. Your daily need goes down in the summer, when you're out and about in
the sunshine, and it goes up in the winter. So my current plan is to get
a 5,000 unit supplement, take two a day in the winter, and one a day in the
summer. That's about the right amount for my body weight. And I figure I
can use daylight savings as my clue for when to switch strategies.

The recommended daily amount suggested at Dr. Mercola's site seems to be:

10,000 units per day for a 300 lb. person

4,000 units per day for a 100 lb. person

2,000 units per day for a large child

1,000 units per day for a small child

So the average 140lb adult typically needs about 5,000 units per day, at approximately
35 units per pound. (I weigh a little over 200 lbs., so my daily need would
be 7,000 units or so. I get a decent amount of sunshine in the summer, so
5,000 units is plenty. And since it's really hard to take too much Vitamin
D, it can't hurt to get a bit more in the winter.)

How Much You Need for a Cure

If you haven't been getting enough sunshine or taking
supplements, and you wind up getting a cold or flu, it turns out that a Vitamin
D3 supplement provides a remedy.

According to Dr. Mercola, you should take 2,000 units per kilogram of body
weight (or, less accurately, 1,000 units per pound), all in one dose, every
day for three days. That should be enough to take any invading microbes by
the scruff of the neck and shake them around until they give up and go away.
(That would be 200,000 units per day for a 200 lb man.)

Note:
Clearly, toxicity
is not a significant problem! For example, the Merck
pages say that "In
adults, taking 50,000 IU per day for several months can produce
toxicity." So a mega dose over a matter of days would have a powerful healing
effect, with no real risk of toxicity.

Note, too, that Vitamin D3's ability to act as cure validates the mechanism
of action that is the basis for its abilty to prevent sickness. That fact provides
the most telling evidence of all--because if a problem results from a vitamin
deficiency, then remedying that deficiency is surely the most effective cure!
(Similarly, if providing a nutrient solves a problem, that is the best possible
evidence that a deficiency was a primary cause of the problem.)

Flu Shots

Flu shots turn out to be not much more than a scam the drug industries are
using to make even more money. (There just never seems to be enough, for some
people.) In the first place, there are no well-designed studies that
show any preventive effect--and several well-designed studies that
show they don't prevent illness.

So what do you get for your flu shot, in return for wasting your money? You
get a toxic chemical cocktail, including:

Mercury (in most all of them--and a toxic dose at that, unless you weigh
more than 550 lbs)